I'm Building a telc B1 Exam App Before Passing the Exam Myself

A few weeks ago I came off my eBike and fractured the radial head in my elbow. It’s a small bone you never think about until it’s broken, and it’s the improbable reason I’m now building a telc B1 exam app. In Germany, an injury like that means calling 116117, the medical on-call line for things that are wrong but not 112-level wrong. I’ve lived in Hamburg for years. I can read a rental contract and roughly understand which rights I’m signing away. I knew exactly what I needed to say.

Then someone picked up, in German, because 116117 is German only, and something in my head quietly unplugged itself.

What came out wasn’t German. It wasn’t English either. It was panic-edition Denglisch: half-finished sentences, articles chosen by coin flip, and the word genau deployed every four seconds like a nervous tic. The only complete sentence I managed was the most useless one available: „Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut.“

A friend made the call for me. A grown, bilingual coward, outsourcing a health hotline.

Why I’m taking the telc B1 (and why telc over Goethe)

That phone call is a fair summary of where I am with German: somewhere between A2 and B1 on paper, fine in daily life, useless under pressure. Hamburg runs on English and my work is entirely in English, so I’ve never been forced into the deep end. I can survive. I just can’t perform. And a language exam is pure performance.

So I booked one. I’m taking the telc B1 in August. It’s the level you need for German citizenship, and once you’ve accepted you’re staying, putting the language off starts to feel a little silly. I went with telc over the Goethe-Zertifikat for boring, practical reasons: dates and test centres were easy to find in Hamburg. If you’re stuck on that decision, honestly, just pick the one you can actually book.

Here’s the part a normal blog post would skip: I haven’t passed it. I haven’t even taken it yet. I’m writing this as a person actively avoiding studying for it.

So naturally, I’m building a German exam app instead of studying

I have terrible motivation for studying. I’ve taken enough language classes to know that exam prep is its own separate, joyless skill on top of actually knowing the language. I will avoid it with impressive creativity.

But I’m a software engineer, and there’s one thing I’ll happily do for twelve hours straight: build software. So I did the only logical thing for a person with my specific flavor of broken brain and bolted the thing I hate onto the thing I love. I’m building Yulo, a telc B1 prep app, while I’m still on the wrong side of the exam myself.

The trick is that building it is studying, through the back door. If I want to model the exam in software, I have to understand it deeply: the ~150-minute written part (reading, Sprachbausteine, listening, writing), the 15-minute oral exam you do in a pair with another candidate, the 300-point scoring where you need roughly 60% in the written and oral parts separately, because they don’t average out. I have to break down the question types, design the scoring, think about strategy. I end up preparing while telling myself I’m just shipping features.

It’s a hack. It’s me tricking myself. And it’s working better than any study plan I’ve ever abandoned in week two.

The telc B1 speaking exam is the boss fight

Of the whole exam, the oral section is the one that keeps me up at night. That’s where the 116117 demon lives. Reading and listening I can grind. Writing I can template. Speaking happens live, under pressure, with a stranger staring at you.

The thing I’m slowly making peace with: the telc B1 oral exam isn’t a conversation, it’s a performance with a rubric. The examiners aren’t waiting for elegance. They want to see that you can make contact, exchange opinions, and plan something, even with mistakes. A wrong article here and there, a genau or two, none of it sinks you. That’s a much smaller, more rehearsable target than “speak German well,” which is the impossible standard I’d been quietly holding myself to.

Follow along

I wrote a longer version of this story on the Yulo blog: I’m Building a German Exam App Before I’ve Passed the telc B1 Myself. That’s where I’ll be documenting the prep as it happens: what’s working, what isn’t, no pretending I’ve got it figured out.

August is coming whether I’m ready or not. Best case, I pass and this turns into a slightly smug success story. Worst case, you get your cautionary tale. Either way, at some point I’m going to call 116117 myself, in German, and stay on the line.